6) North Atlantic Gyre, whirlpool of water trapping huge collections of trash

Assignment: Propose a dataset/topic for Midterm (due in two weeks). Designing a new interaction around a dataset that you find personally meaningful. A brief description of the data you chose, why you are interested in it, and what you wanted to express to the user. A sketch or wireframe of your concept. The color palette and fonts that you are using, any other options you were considering, and why you made these choices. Any next steps you think would be interesting for the project.

GOALS:

work with three.js and another animation library (rune + gsap, p5, or paper.js)

recreate my version of ‘The Powers of Ten’, telling a story about my life, but also about perspective

I know this is a 2 week sprint, so I’m just going to focus on getting the data in and telling one little story of what the earth looks like from the first 3 stops along the way of 10.

SKETCHES:

Font – Oswald

Color – Natural off-bright

I had a lot of trouble deciding what to do for this project. I looked through the ‘programmable web’ for hours, just looking for interesting APIs, then I looked at the ‘data is plural’ newsletter forever, seeing if there were any interesting stories. I also met someone at the WSJ last semester leading the WebVR/360 data journalism team, so I was considering doing something with current news story. Honestly, I got lost in the weeds, but have been wanting to re-create ‘Powers of Ten’ for about a decade now, so why not just dig into it? Right? Even though this is a 2 week sprint, I think it will be educational for me to learn to use the google API, since I’ve barely used an API before. I did a few Udacity lessons on the google maps API and that seemed pretty straight forward.